Though it would seem wrong to start a trailer column without the trailer in question, this is one week in which it would be tempting to do so. It isn't that it's a bad trailer – it's just that even the most casual cinema attendee has probably seen it three times.

While the more regular film fan might have seen it anywhere up to eleventy-jillion times, since they've been trailing it since June, 1576. Or, more accurately, June last year. But as it was reasonably high-profile all that time (the film was supposed to be released at the end of last year), it felt like longer.

Still, for those who might have miraculously managed to avoid it up to this point, this is the trailer:

And this, of course, is the new century's walking, talking embodiment of the inside of Martin Scorsese's creative brain:

Shutter Island.

Wearing a natty tie, it's Leonardo DiCaprio. As is made perfectly clear in the trailer, Shutter Island is an isolated mental health facility, geographically enshrouded 11 miles from the nearest point of land, in a dark, wintery fog of doom, and somewhere off the coast near Boston, if Leo's tight, nasal vowels are to be trusted.

Which is as sensible a place as any to locate a facility for "the most dangerous, damaged patients, ones no other hospital can manage". Such as this one, we assume:

Shutter Island.

So not only dangerous, damaged and, as is explained elsewhere, wily and psychopathic... but also physically terrifying if one were to meet them on a dark, cold night in a cold, dirty institution swathed in the fog of doom. Which is handy, as it turns out:

Shutter Island.

"It's as if she evaporated... straight through the walls," says Ben Kingsley, appearing (from these tiny glimpses) to give a performance half-way between Hammer House of Horror and the audiobook of a Simon Callow tome on the weightiness and craft involved in Being an AC-TORRR.

And that is all, as I say, resoundingly clear. If someone was a fan of the bestselling 2003 novel, they will feel assured that there is no great divergence from the plot of that book. If someone wasn't a fan of that novel, they will feel assured that they now know the plot of that book, seemingly in its entirety.

With all these pieces in place, the only thing remaining is for DiCaprio, apparently, to join the patients. And not in a good way, given the full range of distressed mental-anguish faces he pulls out of his actor's arsenal:

Shutter Island.

The only question we're left with, as an audience, is that as it doesn't look bad, why does it feel as if it's being treated that way by a nervous studio? Given that the trailer premiered eight months ago, was moved out of the way of Oscar consideration (though not before lists and material including the film had been sent out to Academy voters) and the studio hasn't cut together an updated trailer that might market the film in a new light or reignite interest – all these things together seem likely to cause an audience to lose interest.

Some said it was being pushed to 19 February because that was the same week The Silence of the Lambs was released (in 1991), which was also a horror film, and that won an Oscar. Of course, that would mean it's also being released in the US around the historical anniversary of Pooh's Heffalump Movie (a horror, but no Oscar), while the UK date is more astrologically aligned with the anniversary of that Sarah Jessica Parker/Matthew McConaughey classic Failure to Launch. Which, upon consideration, might not be that much of a coincidence after all.